Looks like we're stuck with this relic until 2014, thanks to HP's payment to Intel. I figure HP's going to try to keep Oracle strung along until then as well. This looks like a seriously expensive platform for running a database, and given the emergence of Big Data and the tools that go with it (i.e. Hadoop)... simply put, the Itanium seems to be HP's Edsel. They can pay Intel $690M to keep the chip in production, but can't execute a strategy for the mobile market? Is it any wonder that HP is in the shape that it's in right now?

Itanium is cool hardware - I get it, honestly, I do. I love my old SGI MIPS systems, but I understand their place in the modern world and doubt that I'd recommend a commercial entity putting them into a production environment (considering my Indigo2 and Octane are quite "vintage" by now), but I also don't see SGI building multi-million dollar systems using R10k chips these days either. HP, just let it go.

Probably, I think Itanium would have eventually been down with or without Oracle's actions. If Oracle had done nothing, Itanium would have probably ended of its own momentum in the next few years anyway.

Although Unix has been losing market share to x86-Linux, I think there will still be a space for Unix for high end, mission critical workloads. Unix has a scale up architecture to 64 plus sockets, x86 requires scale out which increases complexity. IBM Power still has a performance advantage over x86. I think the primary argument for Unix instead of x86-Linux is integration. x86 is a "roll your own" from an integration perspective. You not only need to worry about many more servers, switches, I/O adapters, and other physical equipment, but you become responsible for building the platform. You are the peacemaker between OS, hypervisor, hardware, systems management vendors and their various support organizations which is a hassle as compared to a Unix system where the hypervisor is custom built for the hw, the OS is custom engineered with the hypervisor, all of the utilities are custom engineered for that platform and so forth. Unix works out of the box. x86 eventually works and can work at tremendous scale/performance but it requires much more integration at the front end and on-going management/admin. It is the age old cost of acquisition vs. total cost of ownership debate.

"particularly recent buyers who previously had little hope of leveraging their investments before choosing either new software or new servers."

A bit overstated. Oracle only stopped new development on Itanium, such as 12c, but continued to support existing users with existing Oracle software. Anyone who was on 10g or 11g could continue using Itanium without any issues, likewise on the application side such as EBS R12. As this happened in 2010 and 12c (Oracle DB being the primary concern for most people) still has not been released, it really would not have had any impact. Even if someone decided to buy Itanium servers the day before Oracle's announcement, they would have had over three years before any new Oracle DBs were released. As most people don't upgrade their DB anytime near the release date, it really wouldn't have been a problem for Itanium users. They could have finished their normal depreciation schedules.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.